Isn't passive income a cornerstone of of the Rich Dad Poor Dad Books? This long predates 2020. I would say selling masks and only being $800 in the hole is a lot better than starting a "regular business" and down $80k-800k.
My memory of RDPD was that it preaches getting assets which generate income, not that your management of those assets would be passive. Though obviously it also did have a subtext of "scale some kind of assets that generate income to a certain point and you can pay someone else to do more of the grunt work while you look into a new opportunity."
Yes, it was the exact same scheme. Rich Dad Poor Dad was basically "Buy lots of cheap, crappy houses and become a slum lord" expanded into thousands of pages of books, seminars, and self help guides.
There really should be a special category for business books written by people who’ve gone bankrupt. I know at least two well known examples, but there’s got to be a whole lot more.
By working and investing. More successfully at some points than others. But you’re totally right that different people are better set up and more or less inclined to move on from a job than others.
The larger message is young people cannot get passive income in a short time. Sure there are a few born rich, and a tiny handful who by luck and skill (both are needed) get rich quick. However for the vast majority passive income is a long slog of saving a little here and there. (there is a third option - really lower your standard of living so you need almost nothing to live - get a good job but live in a tent city with the poor, cooking on a camp stove - everything you own fits in a backpack). The idea that you can in a few years get enough invested to live on a beach for the rest of your life is a fantasy that sells books but doesn't otherwise exist.
I agree with all that. I've known a couple of people (at least one was out of investment banking--think both were) who pretty much fully retired in their forties, which of course isn't really that young. Some people hit the startup or some other lottery early on and, even if you get a million dropped on you at 25 or 30, you should probably think long and hard about whether you can really just not work any longer. Gives you a lot of breathing room but isn't really a huge pile.
Certainly, there are degrees of frugality. I could probably spend more than I do but don't have a real interest in doing so and generally avoid expensive things that might give me some incremental pleasure but prefer to arrange things so that increment is pretty small and doesn't revolve around "stuff."
A LOT of Millenials were born rich. They may not have realized it, but now that boomers are dying off, it is stratifying Millennials through inheritance.
A lot of them have and continue to receive massive wealth transfers from their boomer parents through free-ish rent, gifts (aka pay for your down payment on a house), etc, etc.
Hard to keep up with what generations are supposedly uniquely disadvantaged. For Millennials specifically, houses would seem to be rather late in the game as they're probably mostly buying in their 30s maybe if they're buying at all and probably haven't been living with their parents for most of that period before.
